“Show man a problem that obstructs his progress, and he will blast it out of the way by sheer will power. But until he sees the problem clearly, he is helpless. It must be stated with such clarity that the full force of human will and intelligence can be brought to bear on it.”
- Colin Wilson
It has been said many times that as human beings we spend our entire life asleep, meaning we are completely oblivious to both the true nature of our existence and the potential power inherent in our biological structure. Why is this? Why is the majority of humanity stuck in a monotonous meaningless experiential state when our consciousness is able to transform our experience? I believe, as Colin Wilson pointed out, our problem is we don’t even realize that we’re asleep – we don’t know that we have a problem.
We believe our mind and consciousness is fixed – we have the feeling that to a large degree our perceptual experience of the world is “given” to us, and we are merely passive observers who take it all in. We don’t try to discover whether there can be action involved in our perception, whether we could influence our conscious experience. We never question the limits of our mind, wondering if there are realms of experience and mental power which exist as potential – dormant in the cellars of our billion year old evolutionary structure. We never attempt to discover for ourselves what states and abilities could be lurking beneath our everyday conscious experience, instead we willingly accept to live as others live – enduring a largely unsatisfying and frustrating life. So this must be the first step towards the beginning of a transcendent life – to realize first of all that walk around asleep, oblivious to the states of experience and modes of being potentially available to us at any moment.
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Tags: Freedom, Meaning, Mind, Symbols
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The individual who has no ultimate goal to work towards is one who swims in a different direction each day, ultimately swimming in circles for the entirety of his existence – never reaching anywhere of any significance. The majority of us live this way. Although we may have a job, a family, a home, and hobbies – we lack an ultimate purpose which we deeply desire to accomplish. To have a purpose is to choose a direction and to swim there constantly – though the darkness, the light, the pain, the joy, and the struggle. Because essentially, when we have a purpose the momentary transitory nature of our experience – whether it be pain or pleasure, is to an extent inconsequential. Every moment is a movement towards the ultimate which manifests itself within our mind, and both pain and pleasure play their role in this journey. What is of true consequence is that eternal light emanating within our mind which guides us ever closer toward our life purpose.
The individual with an ultimate goal will swim in only one direction, knowing within his heart that eventually he will reach land, he will accomplish his supreme goal. He does not “see” the land until he is close to it, yet he moves with a faith that as long as he chooses a direction and sticks to it, it is inevitable that eventually he will find that which he is seeking.
Tags: Faith, Goals, Purpose
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Embedded in an unpredictable world, we act to ensure our needs are met. If our basic needs are not satisfied we will not survive. This fact compels us into action, and thus underlying everything we do is a primitive fear of the void or nothingness of non existence. It is the uncertainty of the world that is our nemesis, as even though we have enough to survive today, we can never be sure that we will tomorrow. This applies not only to our basic survival needs, but also with respect to our state of being – even though we are adequately comfortable and happy today, we can never be sure that we will also be tomorrow.
This uncertainty we feel is a product of the potentially chaotic nature of the world around us. In some sense we are at the mercy of the universe, as some random accident could change our life forever – or even worse bring us face to face with our non existence itself. As animals blessed with an awareness through which we can contemplate the beauty of life and the universe, we are cursed with a foresight which renders us able to conceive of the potential darkness which may lurk around every corner. The uncertainty of our existence is responsible for a fundamental and underlying anxiety which we all share which shapes the very nature of our existence.
This anxiety compels us to try to control the unpredictable forces which we are ultimately at the mercy of. We have progressively harnessed the forces of nature, leaving massive scars on our planet to quiet our anxieties, to give us the illusion that we are in control, not the universe. Because as scared and sensitive animals this is the ultimate – we want control. Control not only of the environment around us, but of the forces which act within us. Our “ego” – our linguistic self system – will not stop until it has the world and our organism under its thumb.
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We are finite animals situated in a universe of infinite proportions. The finiteness of our existence means that one day we will die. Being self aware, we are able to contemplate the inevitable death which draws nearer to us with each coming moment. The more we meditate on our death the more we grasp onto life. We desire to go deeper – into the essence of our being, into the essence of the universe itself.
Within some of us this desire to move deeper into life is always treading on the surface of our conscious awareness. It is ever present in our minds, from the moment we wake to the moment we drift to sleep – it is an obsession that will not leave us alone. For those of us in whom this desire is conscious, life is a continual challenge to escape the superficiality and triviality of the everyday monotony which pervades modern society. We crave authentic meaning we can embody and embrace, one that will cultivate within us a sense of purpose and fulfillment. This longing to go deeper is based on an intuition that the life offered to us by our society – the ways of living and norms we are expected and conditioned to buy into – pale in comparison to the potentialities which lie at the doorstep of our consciousness.
However, for the majority of individuals this desire to go deeper only emerges in awareness during few and far between moments – usually in periods of transition or immense suffering. Within these individuals this desire lies so dormant, so covered and repressed, that it rarely is brought to the surface of conscious awareness – but it is always there, no matter how deeply buried in the unconscious.
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Tags: Transcendence
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